


Same Coin

by IntoTheRiverStyx



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Freeform, Minor Violence, Roadrat if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 06:26:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IntoTheRiverStyx/pseuds/IntoTheRiverStyx
Summary: Junkrat and Roadhog were two sides of the same coin, even if they weren't entirely aware of it.A dialogue-free character exploration fic that spans years in a few thousand words. Chapter 1 is Junkrat's view; Chapter 2 is Roadhog's view. Both chapters follow the same series of events, and each section matches between mini-breaks.Rated for Language





	1. Junkrat

**Author's Note:**

> Both chapters can be read individually without a problem, but if you have the screen to read them side-by-side, give it a shot!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Junkrat's chapter!

Now, there was a man who knew a good deal when he saw one. He knew how to play along. He had to be. My life depended on it.

Old friend. An associate. Someone who’d already been promised a cut of the treasure. Something had to be worth playing along. He was still human, right? Everyone has a price.

FIfty-fifty. Not as cheap as I’d hoped, but my life was worth than my treasure, right? Or at least, without my, my treasure would fade back into obscurity.

He had a bike that already had a sidecar, and I fit in in it like it was meant for me. Hell, maybe it was. Or maybe I just wanted to fit. Either way, we were off.

\-----

I don’t think I stopped talking all night. I told him everything that came to my mind, even if I didn’t remember it once the sentence was over. Maybe he’d remember. Maybe he wasn’t even listening. I didn’t care. It was nice to talk at someone rather than the ghosts of the wasteland, like I’d been doing for...how old was I? That long.

For his part, he let me talk. He didn’t look at me like I was stupid. Or maybe he did, but his mask hid it. Either way, he helped me focus. He made my plans sharper, bombs better places, ambitions bigger. There was a whole world of treasure out there, and most of it probably wouldn’t be radioactive. Yes. It would all be mine. No, ours. It would be ours.

I’d never seen the world when I told him we’d be stealing everything we could, and he didn’t even flinch. Hell, maybe he’d BEEN other places...before. Yes, before. I didn’t know before. I just new now. Everything’s now. Now’s now. Last year was now. Next year will still be now. Nothing’s going to change, not really, not for us. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have our fun and our spoils of mayhem, too.

Oh yes, we were going to take on the world, and we’d win. We’d survived the apocalypse. The rest of the world had to be a joke, right?

\-----

We stole a boat to leave, the bike dangerously strapped in. I curled up in the side care despite myself. He was acting like the water wasn’t dangerous, and maybe he was right, he’d seen the world before the explosion. But you don’t survive just taking other people’s word for things. I’d stay as far away from the water as I could, thank you very much.

Besides, he was my bodyguard. If he ever wanted his payout, he’d protect me. Right?

\-----

Traveling got easier after that, I guess. At least, we were further away from water. Sure, we had to be crafty and become different people who wore different clothes, different faces, different names. He was quiet, let me name us as we moved from place to place. He’d hide the bike when we had to, drive things I had never seen in ways that were too familiar to be entirely foreign to him. He knew the world, yeah. I didn’t know it like he did, probably never would. You can’t just throw away the past, even if you don’t remember it. It seeps into your skin and lives there, somehow transferring itself to your new limbs if you need to build them.

I’d always be Junkrat no matter what name and clothes I wore, and he’d always be Roadhog. Sure, Jamison Fawkes and Junkrat were the same person, but Jamison Fawkes was too formal, somehow more alien that these unmarred lands. No, no. Junkrat. I’d always be Junkrat. Maybe Jamison as a joke, for a moment, but never actually be Jamison, you know?

\-----

Having to lay low was the worst. Worse than the sun. Then spending two and a half decades constantly moving, constantly having to pay more attention that I was capable of paying...the stillness was hell. No, not hell, hell had rules. Stillness was an unpredictable, volatile thing that I couldn’t even talk away. What was there to talk about when the walls were so thin I knew what our neighbors were debating for dinner? Not the heists. Not the outback. Not Junkertown, for sure. The television had hundreds of channels, but that still wasn’t enough to keep my attention.

Roadhog read books like they were the key to handling stillness. They had more words than I knew, more pages than Junkertown had seen pieces of paper, and they were quiet when I needed noise. I’d plan and plot and go over blueprints and whatever else we’d gotten our hands on to prepare for the next heist, but it never felt like I was doing enough. There was minimal danger, nobody circling our room, waiting to pounce. I was going to lose my edge like this. I needed to stay moving to keep sharp.

But we’d keep waiting. I knew. I would wait, or do my best to, scrambling for other things to fill the silence with something, well, less silent.

\-----

There was something about explosions that made the world beautiful. The fire, the noise, the destruction, all of it. I lived for the boom, the riches a glorious bonus, if I was being honest. But I didn’t need to be honest, not really, not when I knew my face and body betrayed anything I wanted to hide in the middle of one of my bombs going off. 

This was all I ever could be, a bomb maker. A bomb lover, perhaps, though love was such an abstraction. This was real. This was here. This was now.

This was the now I’d lived my entire life. This was the moment that kept the quiet ones from turning into deafening silence.

\-----

No job too big, no score too small. We blew shit up, we stole, we swindled, we resold for far more than reasonable. People would always be greedy, and greed would always blind them to how much they had to lose. I didn’t care - they were idiots, soft, too comfortable, too unaware of the dangers the world contained. The dangers people contained. Roadhog was enough to scare anyone into giving up more than the wanted to in the event life hadn’t blinded them already. He didn’t even need to say anything, just stand there. He let me talk, even though I wasn’t the best at negotiations. Guess he knew he was getting half no matter what we wound up with, so all he needed to do was keep showing up.

Small miracle he hadn’t decided to kill me and run off. Maybe he actually needed me.

Nah. But it was a nice thing to tell myself, even if it was never said out loud. I had some sense of self-preservation, lingering in there somewhere.

Besides, I didn’t want to give him the idea he could kill me, you know?

\-----

Mako. He’d finally given me his name. Okay, I’d asked in a moment I wasn’t really thinking about the consequences. The crown jewels were ours, despite news reports they’d all been recovered. Governments lying to their people, big surprise.

But still, he’d given it to me. It felt like a weapon in my head, something he’d rather have stayed forgotten or unknown or however he thought of his before name. Mako. Shark, if it was Maori. Strength, if he was German. Child of Light, if he was Japanese. I couldn’t tell. We’d both been so baked by the Outback sun and wasteland radiation that skin color wasn’t a tell. I’d never seen his face - never really thought of it - so that didn’t help either.

Not that I looked it up. Not that it mattered. 

Roadhog. He was who I’d always known him as. His before name could be forgotten, just like most things that entered my head, yeah?

\-----

So what if we hadn’t brought down Junkertown? Okay, it was my fault, not so what. I deserved that Idiot I got called. I deserve a lot worse. Our entire plan, shot to shit, because I was too proud. Too rash. Too ready to burn the whole place to cinders.

Roadhog was going to kill me. This had to be it. Everything I’d dragged him around the world for, everything we’d gotten our faces and his beloved bike plastered around the world for, wasted because I couldn’t remember my own damned plan.

Fuck.

I was moving. Well, the cart was moving and I was on top of it, but I was still moving as a result. Maybe he wasn’t going to kill me. Or maybe he was waiting until we were closer to the middle of absolute nowhere so he wouldn’t even have to bury my body.

I held on.

\-----

I was still alive, Roadhog was still my bodyguard, and we were still terrorizing every stash of treasure the world thought safe. There were always new security measures to crack, new configurations of concrete and steel to blow up, new efforts the world had put forth to keep us out. 

Joke was on them, though, because the harder they pushed us away, the deeper we embedded ourselves in place. The world thought it was building fences to keep us out, but it was really molding itself around us, every change putting us closer to the center of everything.

Oh yes, this was living.

\-----

It was so rare I got glimpses of who Roadhog might have been, either before or if he’d been born somewhere else, or his parents had changed countries - immigrated? - when he was still a little kid. He had to have had parents, right? Everyone had parents, no matter how long they had them for. Anyways, Roadhog was a fighter, ruthless, without mercy, indiscriminate. He was my bodyguard. The guy under Roadhog, the one with the name he’d told me once, probably wasn’t so different. Maybe softer - heh, not literally - but not too different.

Which was why the fact he had taken up inspecting what was left of my missing limbs after heists, making sure the scars weren’t inflamed, working them over, insisting I take them off to give my bones a break was more than a little surprising. He wasn’t wrong, I’d give him that, but I’d never given much thought to the pain.

They were as much a part of me as his mask was a part of him, I’d thought.

I was starting to think I had been thinking wrong about that.

\-----

It felt like my senses were gone. Shot. Literally.

I’d felt the bullet enter my chest, a few inches above my heart.

I’d picked the right time to stand up taller instead of duck, like instinct had told me to. Instinct was for animals.

I was a master thief. A bomb maker. Junkrat. It would take more than that to kill me. Even if the world didn’t make sense right now, even if my eyes didn’t want to open, even if it was all distant.

I was still here. I wasn’t going anywhere. Roadhog had to be here, if I was still here. He wouldn’t have left me behind.

I knew it. I couldn’t hear him or feel him, but I trusted him.

Holy shit, I trusted him.

\-----

Roadhog had taken care of me. The bullet was gone and the damage was minimal. He wouldn’t talk about and despite everything the world had always thought about me, I had some tact. At least, in this case, I knew better than to press him about it.

I knew what it had meant anyways. He’d taken his mask off in the middle of a getaway to use the gas on me.

I still had no idea what his face looked like, and judging by the news bulletins neither did the rest of the world, but he’d risked exposure for me.

I couldn’t have asked for a better bodyguard. Or a better friend. I told him that. He didn’t respond. 

Which is fine. He doesn’t usually respond, anyway.

\-----

We were back on the road in no time once I was on my feet. I couldn’t let something like a brush with death stop me and Roadie from becoming the richest thieves in the history of history.

Maybe it was time for me to start thinking of a different type of before. Before we’d become internationally wanted. Before we knew how easily the world bowed its head, left itself open to attack.

Before we became kings of the impossible.

Only problem was I had no idea how to tell the two befores apart by name, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of energy on it.

\-----

We’d been tamed.

Okay, not exactly, but we’d become part of a group, and that was close enough to being tamed. We’d been caught together, a whole team of damned heroes against the two of us. People with years of training, a lifetime of being spoiled by having everything at their disposal. Life wasn’t fair, so I didn’t expect this to be fair exactly, but I hated it. I hated how clean everything was. How easy it was to get my needs met. 

I had no idea I’d rather be starving than go legit. I hated that, too.

At least Roadhog and I shared living quarters. I would have lost what was left of my mind without him nearby. 

Roadhog seemed just as miserable as I was. At least they’d recognized us as partners, not separate entities that happened to share goals.

\-----

We left before Overwatch could meet the demise every organization that thinks it’s important does. We hadn’t even talked about it, just packed and disappeared.

We knew what was important.

\-----

We’d made more from Overwatch than we thought, never really bothering to check our accounts while we were there. We didn’t need to, and we knew if we got it in our heads we could leave, we’d be in more trouble than I could really understand.

We’d belonged to Overwatch against our wills. They had been heroes with unwitting participants to help them out, at best. At worst, slavers, hand-picking useful people and ignoring the rest.

Still, the world seemed less exciting. This was round three of seeing what we could pillage, and even mayhem was getting a bit too routine. I was starting to feel like I had time to notice things besides risks.

People were...interesting? Upsetting? In the way?

All of the above, probably. There were so many of them, everywhere, so different from each other. All shapes and sizes, all colors, dressed in more fabrics than I thought could exist. Overwatch had been my first taste of interacting with people who weren’t Junkers but still had the same goal. Okay, so it wasn’t really my goal, but I’d made it my goal to get through. Same thing, right?

Family, Roadhog had told me the clusters of people who tended to look alike were called. They moved like pack animals, like prey, and the smallest of them made terrible noises for no fucking reason. For some reason, though, I didn’t hate them.

The smaller groups touched each other without hesitation. They were so oblivious, so cocooned, so vulnerable. So different from me. I could never fit in. Not with families. Not with societies that hadn't sprung from the apocalypse.

Maybe Roadhog understood them, but he gave no indicator either way. Maybe he’d forgotten. Or maybe he’d never known.

\-----

It was starting to feel like there wasn’t anything in the world we couldn’t make ours. It didn’t matter everyone we hit knew who and what hit them - okay, maybe it did, but not in a bad way, you know? It was a proud thing, Junkrat and Roadhog, notorious Junker crime duo. The madman and his bodyguard.

Was I mad? Probably. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had a mind that wasn’t this one, so how would I know if I was mad or if other people just didn’t think enough to be as great as I was. Roadhog, man, he was smart, too, but he didn’t talk enough to tell how his mind worked. Did he think his mind was broken? Did he think my mind was broken?

It didn’t matter. The world really was becoming ours. We were moving closer and closer to the center of everything.

This was fun.

\-----

Overwatch called us back, and we showed up. On our own free will this time. Guess I kinda missed it, them, both. I dunno. What mattered was we hadn’t been forced this time.

Not sure what had changed since the fall, but this was a new Overwatch. So different. So much...tighter run but free? 

Different, yeah. That was the only word for it. I’d never seen anything like it. The new Overwatch didn’t have the oversight of the old Overwatch, but it wasn’t lawless and without order like Junkertown had been.

I think I’d grow to not hate this.


	2. Roadhog

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part two! Roadhog this time!

It wasn’t even that the offer itself was great (it wasn’t awful) or that his life and death was going to be determined by my reply. It was his madness.

He was just insane enough I had a shot at reminding the world we were still here, still angry, and still capable of fucking up their quiet lives.

The world deserved mayhem, and this man was the harbinger. And I’d be getting half of whatever we brought in in the process, which was more than fair. Not that I’d tell him.

He fit perfectly in the sidecar, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. He knew, or he didn’t. I couldn’t tell how much he knew. How much of his mind was still there.

\-----

This kid didn’t shut up. Maybe half the take was too little to put up with his incessant jabbering. I couldn’t blame him entirely - he looked young enough to not have known anything besides “post apocalyptic wasteland for a home.” Eventually I’d start telling him to shut up, probably, but not tonight. Tonight was for getting as far away as we could.

Kid was a genius whose poor impulse control made him an idiot. If he could be trained - yes, trained, like an animal - he’d be the greatest criminal mastermind the world had ever seen. But no, too much madness, probably from years of radiation wearing his mind and other senses down. Still, nothing stopped him. Nothing slowed him down. Everything was a potential tool, or something that could be blown up.

Had the ALF been successful, maybe he would have been a more normal kid. One of those super smart ones who was always bored and getting into trouble, but more normal. Maybe he’d’ve been whole. He never let his prosthetics - he had to have built them himself - slow him down. He had no idea it was my fault he’d grown up like this, and he didn’t need to know. I’m sure he kept secrets, as much as he never shut the hell up. Still, he took winning seriously - he took survival seriously. He’d been the most impulsive choice I had ever made, but he was starting to feel like a gamble that had paid off.

\-----

I swear to the gods that have forsaken us, kid, if you get seasick IN my bike I am going to throw you overboard. I didn’t say it, as much as I’d been tempted to. If he got seasick, he’d be sitting in his own vomit. If he was still talking, I couldn’t head him over the waves, so at least I had the closest thing to quiet since I’d become a bodyguard.

Bodyguard. Heh. No one had jobs since the explosion. So much for anarchy, little ‘Rat.

\-----

The kid got used to things fast. It was in his nature, his underlying insanity that managed to punctuate even his calmest movements and words. Madness that kept him from being too jarred by seeing the world for the first time. He adapted quickly, ready to make both of us blend in until we didn’t need to, then we’d go back for the bike and leave. He’d laugh and laugh, even his words somehow easy, disturbed laughter. This was all a game to him, I think. Well, at least he was still bent on winning, and willing to blow up anything in his way. I couldn’t tell if fear was an unknown feeling, or just one he didn’t pay attention to.

He’d given me his name, once. Jamison Fawkes. Of course it was. Jamison - supplanter. Supplant: To trip up or overthrow. Somehow more accurate than Junkrat, but he didn’t know that. I didn’t think he could read, nonetheless care enough to look up what his name meant. My given name died with my home, but his had never had the chance to live.

\-----

There were stretches where we’d have to hole up in a little motel that took cash in place of names. We’d only leave our room once every few days for supplies - food, clothes, drinks, whatever the place we were staying didn’t provide. I was almost sure he’d never seen a microwave before, and once we’d had a single burner that blew his mind. We’d had electricity in Junkertown, but not enough to power regular personal cooking. Sure, I’d lived outside town, but that meant nothing for the resources at my disposal, insofar as food prep.

I found my own ways to pass time. He didn’t. It drove him mad, waiting, planning. He was a creature of impulse, and nothing would ever change that. Despite his constant, ever-present frustration, it was in the silence his brilliance showed through. Despite his functional illiteracy, he could read blueprints like they were more natural than breathing. I knew there was no way he’d picked that up in Junkertown. Not that I’d praise him aloud. He already had his own head to contend with. Didn’t need to add to his own mental chatter.

He’d learn to wait. Or he wouldn’t. Either way, he wasn’t so far gone he’d forget why we had to stay quiet. Stay still. Stay invisible until we were ready to move again.

\-----

His bombs were almost too perfect. They’d smile at you and then try to kill you if you stood too close. Like him, I supposed, but with less to hide behind. A bomb had one purpose, only one possible outcome. He was far less predictable, but similarly volatile. They were his kin, this kid who had to have raised himself. He saw his own reflection in his work.

In another life, another world, he would have made an excellent engineer. Or maybe a mechanic, if he hadn’t been able to stay in school or maintain the grades.

But that wasn’t the world he had. He was a demolitions expert. A madman. A Junkrat.The world deserved this version, really.

\-----

Riches piled up, we kept them in a communal bag, sold them as we needed to. We kept telling each other we’d split the end profit, but I was starting to doubt there would even be an end to this. We had become to intertwined, the world had become too much of a thing to take from. No, this was how life was going to play out no matter how I felt about it. I tried not to feel. I’d avoided it for a long time, I could keep on that path despite how much things had changed since the skinny blonde who trusted me with his life from square one ripped out the roots I thought I needed to survive. Why I would never know, because for all his yammering he never got near why he’d put his life in the hands of a stranger.

It could all be mine if I slit his throat in his sleep.

Nah. This kid was more than he knew, and I could never have done this on my own. Not like this. Roadhog, Mako, neither of us took on the world like Junkrat.

Just like the world deserved Junkrat, I needed him. Shit.

\-----

Duke Roadhog had the chance to keep the crown jewels to himself, but he decided to split them with Mako in a moment of weakness. It was a reflexive answer, as if my given name was still lingering on the surface.

What’s your name again. Why? Why was it Mako? Why was Mako still in there? I’d been Roadhog for so many years. The kid had called himself Jamison, so maybe Mako had just slipped out, something equally absurd and far removed from who we were, the power of the jewels getting to both of us. Yes. That had to be it. Mako was all but dead. If nothing else, the kid couldn’t tell how panicked my before name made me.

Breathe. A few times, breathe. Easy, Roadhog.

Besides, he’d only called me Mako once, then back to Roadhog he went. Maybe he understood. Or maybe not. I really couldn’t tell.

\-----

Idiot. Everything we’d worked for, every ehist, every piece of treasure we’d hauled from country to country, just sitting on a hover cart waiting to explode. I grabbed the fuse, extinguishing it before we could lose everything. 

He was laughing, but it wasn’t because he found anything funny. He was terrified. Of me. After everything, he was terrified I’d turn on him for fucking up like this. I didn’t think the kid could hurt me.

I was wrong.

I grabbed the craft lead and started walking it away, back towards my bike. Junkrat was still on top of it, stuttering more than successfully talking. He didn’t even have a stutter. Yeah, terrified. Little bastard really had no idea, did he?

We were going to finish taking on the world, riches in hand. This hell could rot.

\-----

We pushed forward, riches making us richer, new challenges making Junkrat smarter. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t crack, explode, or otherwise confound. We also hadn't met a person I couldn’t intimidate. We were a perfect pair, our differences filling in spaces we otherwise wouldn’t’ve been able to fill.

This. This was what life had been missing since the explosion. This was challenge, ingenuity, and power. Junkertown had primed us, but the world had tempered us. They deserved us because they’d made us.

Oh yes, they’d made their own worst nightmares.

\-----

Some moments made it harder to keep the kid alive than others. Sure, if he was to suddenly expire, shuffle off this godforsaken mortal coil, whathaveyou, I could sell what we had and be set for several lifetimes over. I could shed both Mako and ROadhog, buy a new name with a new past, never thing about the ALF or Junkertown or the fact I was - we were - wanted in more countries that I knew the names of. But that wouldn’t have been as fun, or have carried as many possibilities.

I needed the kid. I needed the kid alive. I was no longer sure they were separate statements. I wasn’t sure when they’d become separate statements, though I was sure I could tell if I had given it enough thought. How long had I cared not only that he was alive, but was in the best possible condition?

I didn’t know.

But I cared.

\-----

Everything had gone wrong.

Well, not everything, not exactly.

We’d gotten away. We still had our treasure. The bike was hidden so securely I wasn’t worried about it being discovered.

But Junkrat was still unconscious, or at least looked it. He would twitch periodically, but not respond to voice or touch. 

He’d passed out from the pain - I hadn’t thought he even had a pain threshold - and it was my fault.

Some bodyguard I was.

He’d trusted me, and I let him get shot.

\-----

When the kid stopped asking me how he’d made it with no lasting damage, I realized I should have just lied. Spent the time he was out cold making up a story. He’d believe anything I said. But I didn’t.

The fact he stopped meant only one thing: he knew. He was too smart to not know, anyways. It threw me off center.

He had spent years off and on asking me what I looked like behind my mask, never serious, just grating enough it was infuriating.

And now he knew it wasn’t literally attached, and he’d just...stopped asking. And then praised me, called me a friend.

Nobody praised me. Ever. What the fuck, ‘Rat? What were you playing at?

\-----

Nothing stopped this man. I really needed to stop thinking of him as a kid. Sure, he was half my age, but he wasn’t a kid.

He was a man, an impossible man, a man who knew how powerless the world was against the right combination of tools, planning, and explosives. A man the world would remember forever. Me, too, but I was more of an afterthought in this analysis of Junkrat.

And oh, did he have a handle on the explosives. 

I still wasn’t convinced he had a handle on himself, or anything else in his life, but if it didn’t matter to him, I couldn’t let it matter to me.

\-----

Overwatch had caught us in a sting.

They’d been trailing us for months, if not years, and their unyielding work and infinite resources had paid off, for them. Junkrat and I didn’t fit here, not the way we did on our own. Sure, we’d never have to worry about food, water, or access to health care again. If he got shot, he’d be repaired faster and more efficiently than I could have managed. I’d never have to worry about running out of gas.

But it was still awful. This wasn’t living anymore. It was surviving with more glitter.

They’d put ‘Rat and I in the same quarters, partners slipping out of their lips like we weren’t telling them everything.

We weren’t, of course, but not in the way they’d assumed. I wasn’t going to correct them, and Junkrat had no idea what it meant.

\-----

The fall of Overwatch was not a graceful thing. We’d left before it could officially disband. No way we could afford to get caught. Not again.

We could afford a lot of other things, though.

\-----

Overwatch had, if nothing else, paid us for our time with them. They had money to burn, and knew everyone had a price. Whether they knew we’d be harder to buy than your average soldier, I didn’t know.

Besides that, we weren’t soldiers. We were thieves, Junkers, crimes lords. Not heroes. Never heroes.

Maybe time with Overwatch had changed Junkrat, but he was looking at the world different now. Sharper, more taken in, more than just red flags catching his attention for more than a fraction of a second.

Given his attention span and general care level, it was almost impressive.

Junkertown had been so far from what power and relational dynamics in the rest of the world were. He’d never gotten the primer I had, just be existing. Family was foreign to him. I’d never seen a kid in Junkertown. I’d heard rumors people further out had kids since before, but I’d never gone to check. Waste of time, waste of care.

Here, though, families were everywhere, and Junkrat was noticing. The first time he’d really heard a baby cry he’d nearly jumped out of his skin and asked what someone could do to a cat to make it sound like that.

He’s stare at couples as if they were a puzzle he could solve. He didn’t envy them, but he didn’t understand them. He’d only even been touched in agner, by people with violent intent. And by me, but I wasn’t about to quantify that.

He’d been robbed of so many basic, human experiences because of me. Because of the ALF. Thinks I’d had. Things I’d fought for. Things I had, of course, lost to hubris.

\-----

Everything was easy now - almost too easy. We were known members of Overwatch, known criminals, just...KNOWN. Our faces - wellm Junkrat’s face and my mask, our given names, our chosen names, my bike I’d let Junkrat paint (not that NOT painting it would have made it less recognizable). But we were never caught.

Perhaps we were as good as we thought, Overwatch was just better, which made us the second to Overwatch as far as avoiding detection. Or something of that nature. I don't know. Maybe Junkrat’s scattered, broken process was wearing off on me. Whatever the cause, I didn’t know the solution.

We were richer than ever. We’d started pulling more small heists, more theft of things that didn’t have any real value but were just there for the stealing. 

We were bored.

\-----

After receiving Winston’s distress call, coming back to Overwatch seemed like the most natural thing in the world despite there being nothing natural about it.

Things had changed. We were running a bare-bones operation, the targets and end goals were different, when they were clear at all.

I knew this pattern. I knew this desperation. This was running the risk of becoming the ALF all over again. Maybe with less apocalypse at the end, but maybe not. We wouldn’t know until we got there.

I was terrified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a lot of fun writing this, and I hope y'all had fun reading this! I've never written anything like this, and it was harder than I expected but still a lot of fun.
> 
> Feedback is love! <3

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written anything like this. Feedback is love <3


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